Tag: faeries

“Romantic, suspenseful and witty all at once — ALICE IN WONDERLAND meets NEVERWHERE.” � Claudia Gray, New York Times bestselling author of the Evernight series on The Girl Who Never Was

Don’t miss this enchanting prequel to the exciting summer debut of The Girl Who Never Was. Before the enchantment breaks, Selkie thinks she’s just an average teenage girl…

It’s the beginning of summer vacation, and everyone at Selkie Stewart’s Boston high school is excited. Except for Selkie, who sees herself standing at the edge of an abyss of Nothing To Do. Selkie doesn’t want to spend her summer scouring the kitchen for gnomes with her crazy aunts or mooning over the enigmatic boy on Boston Common. So instead Selkie goes in search of a job. What she finds is a new best friend, a cute boy who might be more than he seems, and even more question about her mother and her past — and a sense that Selkie’s adventures are just beginning.

My Thoughts:
Let me say that I have read The Girl Who Never Was and I LOVED it. It was FANTASTIC! Now as for this prequel, it fell a little flat for me but please, please, if you have not yet read The Girl Who Never Was, please don’t let this novella discourage you away from it because it is absolutely ENCHANTING and if your a y/a, paranormal/fantasy fan it is a book you will not want to miss!

2.5 Stars

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In the early twentieth century, two little girls caused a massive media event when they claimed to have taken photographs of faeries near the brook in their backyard in Cottingley, England. The photographs caught the imagination of the country, and celebrities like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, descended upon the area, hoping to spy faeries themselves.

Eventually, the little girls admitted it had all been a hoax, and that they had set up the photographs using paper cutouts of faeries from a catalog.

Good thing, too, because all the attention was really cramping the style of the faeries who liked to pop over to Cottingley for a visit.

Do you think there is any truth in the legends? What mythological creatures do you think might be hiding out there? Unicorns? Bigfoot? The Loch Ness Monsteottingley

In the early twentieth century, two little girls caused a massive media event when they claimed to have taken photographs of faeries near the brook in their backyard in Cottingley, England. The photographs caught the imagination of the country, and celebrities like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, descended upon the area, hoping to spy faeries themselves.

Eventually, the little girls admitted it had all been a hoax, and that they had set up the photographs using paper cutouts of faeries from a catalog.

Good thing, too, because all the attention was really cramping the style of the faeries who liked to pop over to Cottingley for a visit.

Do you think there is any truth in the legends? What mythological creatures do you think might be hiding out there? Unicorns? Bigfoot? The Loch Ness Monster?

Hi Everyone, Today I’ve got some really cool stuff to share with you. Some background info on the Unseelie Court and Wizards. I am also sharing a link for the first 5 chapters of The Girl Who Never Was as well as the book trailer reveal!!

*The Unseelie Court*

In Scottish folklore, the Unseelie Court was the “evil” court set up in opposition to the Seelie Court. I really liked the idea of there being no such clear dichotomy any longer: Both courts had become corrupted and dangerous to the Otherworld. Because the Seelie Court was traditionally considered the court of light, I placed it in bright sunlight. By contrast, the Unseelie Court was traditionally considered the court of darkness, so I placed it underground, accessible to our world by going below. This is not to imply that the Seelie Court is accessible by going above, but I wanted to keep the dichotomy between the two. In my head, they almost exist on the same sheet of paper, but one is on top and one is on the bottom. The Seelie Court rules the Otherworld and its tendrils are everywhere. I wanted the Unseelie Court to be its own little fiefdom within that kingdom, tolerated by the Seelie Court only because the Unseelies had assembled enough power of their own to resist them. The Unseelies do not mind being creatures of the darkness, and they are happy to stay in their self-contained world. Their border control measures are intense, and they seldom interact with the rest of the Otherworld. The Seelie Court would tell you this is because they do not wish the Unseelies to have access to the Otherworld, but the Unseelie Court has no desire to branch out into the rest of the Otherworld. They have no interest in political power, they only seek to be left alone to their dark magic. The Unseelies will grant asylum on occasion to those who need it. Because it is the only independent place in the Otherworld, it is the only place to hide from Seelies. Also, because it is so inaccessible, all sorts of amazing legends have grown up about it in the Otherworld. Otherworld creatures are taught that everyone and everything could be living in the Unseelie Court, every terrifying creature that could be imagined, because none of the Otherworld creatures really know what happens there.

*Wizards*

In the days when the borders between the Thisworld and the Otherworld were open, wizards (the female counterparts were known as witches) were quite common and it was considered a well-respected calling. It was favored, in the beginning, by families that already had great wealth, because there was little money to be made off of it. Magic, however, was a dangerous thing to practice, exhausting and potentially deadly if abused, so it was mostly favored for second sons as an alternative to the clergy. Witches and wizards attended universities of magic in order to learn their craft. Each developed talents for a particular type of magic that acted as their specialty. They tended to be naturally self-confident and arrogant, as belief and intent were two necessary ingredients to magic, which resulted in many clashes and feuds. Every witch and wizard consider themselves to be the best, and every other witch and wizard to be a pretender to their throne. Magical alliances were frequently fraught with tensions between overbearing personalities, and, as such, wizards and witches tended to be loners when it came to each other, even if some did develop friendships outside of the field. (William Blaxton had a reputation for being an especially gregarious wizard when it came to interspecies relationships, which was how he ended up forging the New World path.) When magic began to fall out of favor in the onslaught of science, it began to be seen as a haven for eccentrics. Most of the last of the wizards and witches were adventurous souls, drawn to the unpredictability of the practice of magic, and many of them ended up in the New World, which they thought at the time might be more accepting of the idea of the continued existence of everyday magic. Will Blaxton settled Boston. His fellow wizard Roger Williams settled Rhode Island, slightly farther south, together with help from their fellow witch Anne Hutchinson. Meanwhile, another wizard, self-styled Lord Timothy Dexter, settled north of Boston in Newburyport. In the early days, the witches and wizards thrived and were well-respected members of the community, but eventually they began to clash more and more with the humans who arrived and who were not interested in continuing on the practice of magic. Most of the witches and wizards went underground and rewrote the history books to take the power of their magic out of the words. The Salem Witch Trials were an effort to ferret out all of the remaining magic in the New World, but it was sadly entirely ineffective and managed merely to kill a great many innocent people, as the witches and wizards had already gone into hiding by that time.

Hello, hello, hello everyone! I’m so thrilled to be one of the lucky few that has had the privilage of reading an arc of Skylar Dorset’s new y/a fantasy novel THE GIRL WHO NEVER WAS. I will have a full review closer to the publishing date but I have to tell you, you’re definitely going to want to read this one! As we near closer to the release of this enchanting novel I will be bringing you lots of fun stuff you don’t want to miss!

I am so excited about all the fun we have planned leading up to the release of this book. Below is this week’s “DVD extra” on the Seelie Court and the Four Fays of the Seasons. Don’t forget to keep checking in because we have so much more in store! Enjoy!!

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The Seelie Court

Scottish mythology uses the term “Seelie Court” to refer to “good” faeries. But the Seelies have undergone a perversion from the times when they enjoyed their positive reputation among the Scots, so that by Selkie’s time, the term “Seelie” no longer indicates “good,” and that is, in fact, why we don’t see faeries as much anymore: The witches and wizards on our side have closed the borders for our own protection.

As understood by inhabitants of the Otherworld, the “Seelies” are a specific line of incredibly powerful faeries. Severely inbred for a long period of time, they consolidated their genetic talents until they reached the point where they had gained a power not held by any other faerie: the power to dissolve another being with the use of their name. Naming is always painful and destructive to all supernatural creatures, but only the Seelies managed to hone it into an effective murder weapon. Using this power, the Seelies realized they could control the entire Otherworld. They then undertook a war to force adherence to their Court, which resulted in a bank of names which the Seelies use to keep their subjects in line. Seelies are also very well-schooled in methods of “persuasion” to compel actions on the parts of others, including the divulgence of their names.

Once they consolidated power, the Seelies determined to keep it forever. They did this by freezing their numbers, forbidding procreation, in order to make sure that power did not have to be shared by more than the three dozen or so Seelies who already existed. They also set out on a campaign of re-writing history. The Seelies simply wanted everyone to forget the unpleasant way in which they came to power, so they learned how to make forgetting a specialty of theirs. They outlawed the writing of books, because the power of words written down is one of the few things that can destroy the Seelie power to compel forgetfulness.

In the folklore, Seelies are capricious souls who do everything on a whim. Like most faeries, they are fairly bad at advance planning and impulse control. Unlike most faeries, this results in a terrifying amount of senseless violence. Seelies enjoy a special rush of power during a naming that drives them to name other faeries; they need no further reason. This has provoked such panicked terror in their subjects that the Otherworld has become an intensely paranoid and mistrusting place, where creatures seldom speak for fear of attracting any attention.

The mythology of the Seelie Court also usually painted the Seelie Court as gay and happy, forgetting their sorrows quickly. But that’s what makes the Seelie Court so terrifying: the Seelies forget, quickly, which makes them almost emotionless. If you can’t remember your sorrows, then you have no understanding that you are happy. You just are. This also dovetails with another frequent Seelie Court trait in the folklore: Seelies hurt humans without realizing it, because they simply don’t understand human feelings. The Seelie Court just cannot comprehend being attached to people or things. They are simply not that way. They have no loyalty, no sense of liking or even disliking the things in the world with them. They like being in charge, and beyond that they don’t care.

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The Four Fays of the Seasons

There was a prophecy. Prophecies are tricky things, difficult to read. The future is never set in stone and there is never just one path to take. So it is never clear what a prophecy actually means. Some faeries excel at reading the stars and the cards and the swirl of the dancing dust motes and the patterns in spices like salt and pepper. And those faeries will tell you that there was a prophecy.

The prophecy was that there would be four fays born of Seelie blood, one for each season, just as one season ended and the next season began. These four fays would band together to overthrow the tyranny of the Seelie Court and rescue the Otherworld. They would bring about an era of unrivaled peace and joy and happiness.

Or they wouldn’t at all. In fact, they would do the exact opposite.

You see, that’s the thing about a prophecy: There’s never just one side to it.

One thing all of the faeries agreed on, though: The four fays of the seasons might not succeed in overthrowing the Seelie Court. But the Otherworld would never overthrow the Seelie Court without them. And so the Otherworld fastened all of its hopes and dreams on four unknown fays. And waited.

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Welcome to my blog and this very special first look at Skylar Dorset’s new Y/A fantasy novel The Girl Who Never Was!

** The Otherworld **

The Otherworld is a world inhabited by supernatural creatures. Not as geographically solid as the human world, its regions are flexible and fluid and sometimes the links between them can be terminated in the face of outside threats. This became common in the years just before the Seelies took over, when border control measures attempting to keep the Seelies out of certain regions, the Otherworld growing more segregated in its protectionism. The Seelies were strong and talented enough to overcome the measures, and they now control, for the most part, the geography of the Otherworld.

Faeries, gnomes, ogres, and goblins all used to live exclusively in the Otherworld. Eventually, a special group of faeries (called “travelers”) realized that they could jump from the Otherworld into a totally different world, inhabited entirely by another species with considerably shorter lifespans and very different types of talents as well as very different types of vulnerabilities. Up until the time when the worlds began to cross over, there had been no need to name either world. Once travel between the two worlds became increasingly popular, both supernatural creatures and humans alike began referring to the human world as the Thisworld and the supernatural world as the Otherworld. (The supernatural beings liked being the “others.” They had always been used to finding value in “otherness,” in a way humans weren’t used to.)

This all happened millennia ago. Or just the other day. It depends on what kind of time you keep.

Once upon a time, the Otherworld and the Thisworld got along very well. Goblins migrated to the Thisworld fairly early on, drawn by the vast jewelry reserves. Faeries also flitted over frequently, growing increasingly more cavalier about being seen (this coincided with the historical frequency of faerie sightings, which died down as Otherworld-Thisworld relations deteriorated). Gnomes and ogres also traveled over, but they were naturally more averse to being seen and tried to blend in undetected. In the meantime, schools of sorcery started up in the Thisworld, training the most talented humans to interact on a supernatural level. They serve, primarily, as diplomatic posts, encouraging their students to “study abroad” in the Otherworld for a little while.

When the Seelies began to take over the Otherworld, the Otherworld found itself embroiled in a civil war. Many supernatural creatures actually returned to the Otherworld at that point, in an attempt to protect their homeworld. As the Seelies began to win, the remaining witches and wizards in the Thisworld offered various havens to those Otherworld creatures who sought it. These havens then reacted to the collapse of the Otherworld by shutting out all faeries, who had by then developed a Seelie-driven reputation for preying on human children.

**Travelers**

Faeries, much like wizards and witches, tend to carry particular talents through their genetic lines. The Seelies are nothing but genetically honed super-faeries, in effect, who happen to be unusually strong in naming power. Travelers are faeries who are especially good at the art of travel: they are never lost, possessing unerring senses of direction; they can get into and out of almost any room; and they have the unique ability to “jump” between physical spaces and between worlds, switching locations in the blink of an eye. Doors cannot be locked against them, and they can call for trains at will. Human folklore calls them “will o’ the wisps,” which humans understood to be luring them to their deaths. In reality, travelers are generally caught up in their own activities and seldom notice if they catch a human eye.

As the Seelies began to consolidate power, traveling became more valuable and, conversely, more dangerous to them. Travelers could spread word, quickly and easily, organizing rebellion and keeping others apprised of the Seelies’ movement. As a result, the Seelies began to hunt travelers in earnest. First they forbade the continuation of the line, and then, eventually, they imprisoned or named every traveler they could find. They left just one, for their own use, because the power of the travelers was too intense to eliminate altogether.

The immense talent of the travelers is balanced by immense weaknesses, which was why they never rose to the power of the Seelies. A traveler’s power can be disabled by the simple touch of a goblin, making them sworn enemies. Moreover, travelers are severely allergic to water, which dampens their abilities and can also weaken them to a point near death if they are kept too wet for too long. Finally, while travelers cannot be locked out of a room, they can be locked into one. The enchantment is a tricky one and requires much power but can be performed.

While traveling comes naturally to travelers, it is nevertheless exhausting, and they will often need rest after too much of it at once, especially if water is involved at any point. Some places are easier to travel to than others, and in times of great distress travelers will frequently focus on those. A traveler’s homeworld is always the simplest for him or her to return to. Cottingley is the easiest place for them to reach in the Thisworld. Even when the worlds were sealed into separation, the membrane between them has always been thinnest at Cottingley, making it the most ideal place to bridge the two. (Iceland is also heavy in faerie lore and also an easy place for a traveler to get to.)